NEW YORK: A risky predawn raid by US special operations forces that resulted in the death of the Islamic State group’s leader on Thursday was set in motion months ago with a tip that the top terrorist was hiding out on the top floor of a house in northwest Syria.
In brief remarks at the White House, President Joe Biden said the decision to send about two dozen helicopter-borne commandos to capture or kill the leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, was made to minimise the risk of civilian harm.
Military officials said attacking with a bomb or a missile would have been safer for the troops but could have endangered more than a dozen civilians in the house, including several children.
“We made a choice to pursue a special forces raid, at a much greater risk than our — to our own people, rather than targeting him with an airstrike,” Biden said. “We made this choice to minimize civilian casualties.”
Aides said Biden had approved the raid Tuesday morning after months of military planning, including dozens of rehearsals and an exercise involving a tabletop model of the building.
On Thursday, he called the operation a warning to all terrorist groups. “This operation is testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they try to hide anywhere in the world,” he said.
In the end, Biden said, al-Qurayshi died when the terrorist exploded a bomb that killed him as well as members of his own family. Rescue workers said women and children were among at least 13 people killed during the assault. Pentagon officials said that 10 civilians, including eight children, had been safely evacuated and that commanders would review whether the mission had caused civilian harm.
The US assault, carried out by about two dozen Army Delta Force commandos backed by Apache helicopter gunships, armed Reaper drones and attack jets, resembled the raid in October 2019 in which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the previous leader of the Islamic State group, died when he detonated a suicide vest as US forces raided a hideout not far from where Thursday’s operation took place.
Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, tacitly acknowledging a recent spate of reports of U.S. airstrikes killing civilians, said the Pentagon would review whether the raid had caused any civilian casualties. Last week, Austin ordered the military to strengthen its efforts to prevent civilian deaths and to improve the way it investigates and acknowledges claims of civilian harm in U.S. combat operations.
For Biden, the success of the operation was a welcome relief from the looming threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was important for another reason: After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan last year, there was widespread concern that the US evacuation would give the Islamic State group a new opportunity to retake territory. CIA Director William Burns told Congress that efforts to collect intelligence about local Islamic State operations could suffer.
Speaking in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, Biden was understated as he described the history of the militant leader, saying that he had ordered a series of atrocities, including against the Yazidi people.
Little is known about al-Qurayshi, whose real name is Amir Muhammad Said Abdel-Rahman al-Mawla, or other members of the group’s senior command. But his death was a significant blow to the terrorist group, analysts said.
While he was nowhere near as prominent as his predecessor, “Mr. Qurayshi still commands a lot of respect within jihadi circles and is known to be highly intelligent and able to think strategically,” said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York.
Indeed, after al-Qurayshi replaced al-Baghdadi, the United States put a bounty of up to $10 million on his head. Clarke said that al-Qurayshi, who was 45 and born in Iraq, had kept a low profile, which helped him elude an US-led manhunt but also may have hampered his ability to expand the Islamic State group’s global network and brand. In March 2019, the group lost the last piece of its territory, which once stretched across parts of Syria and Iraq.
According to two senior administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the operation, an unspecified intelligence tip had placed al-Qurayshi in the Atmeh area of Idlib province and then, by early December, more specifically at a stand-alone, three-story cinder block building surrounded by olive trees.
Images shared on social media by activists who visited the site showed simple rooms with mats on the floors, a diesel heater and clothes and blankets scattered about, some of them covered with blood. (continues below)
US officials said al-Qurayshi and his family lived on the third floor. He left the building only occasionally to bathe on the rooftop. He relied on a top lieutenant who lived on the building’s second floor and who, along with a network of couriers, carried out his orders to Islamic State branches in Iraq and Syria, and elsewhere in the world without using electronic devices whose signals Western spies could intercept - a practice Osama bin Laden used for years.
Top Pentagon officials and military commanders apprised Biden of their planning, at one point presenting a model of the building where the Islamic State leaders and their families lived - and noting that a Syrian family with no apparent connection to the terrorist group was living on the first floor.
Mindful of the danger to civilians and to the commandos, military engineers told Biden that they did not believe the entire building would collapse if al-Qurayshi detonated a suicide vest or larger explosives on the third floor.
They proved correct. Opting for a ground raid allowed the commandos to try to safely evacuate civilians from the building, something not possible in an airstrike, which might flatten the building. In the end, no Americans were hurt.
Shortly after the commandos arrived, warnings shouted in Arabic over bullhorns urged occupants on the first floor, as well as anyone else, to evacuate. One man, one woman and four children fled the first floor. Not long after that, al-Qurayshi detonated his explosives - much bigger than a suicide vest - in a blast so powerful that bodies, including his own, were blown out the window.
“He killed himself and his immediate family without fighting, even as we attempted to call for his surrender and offered him a path to survive,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of Central Command, who oversaw the mission, said in a virtual security conference sponsored by the Middle East Institute on Thursday.
After the blast, commandos stormed the building and engaged in a firefight with al-Qurayshi’s top lieutenant and his wife, who were barricaded on the second floor with their children. Both were killed, as was one child, but four children were safely evacuated. US officials said most of the casualties resulted from the explosion on the third floor and fighting on the second floor.
In complex raids, the military’s initial version of events may be incomplete. Accounts of past operations have at times turned out to be contradictory or wrong, and the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, John Kirby, warned that the Pentagon was still collecting information from the assault.
Kirby said that military forensics experts identified al-Qurayshi using fingerprint and DNA analysis, and left his remains at the site. Kirby said US troops took no prisoners or civilians into custody. But he indicated that the commandos collected materials such as cellphones and computer hard drives, as is customary in this kind of operation, that analysts will pore over for clues on combating the Islamic State group.
Asked about the timing of the raid, Kirby said multiple factors played a role: intelligence levels, certainty about the militant leader’s location, weather and operational conditions (it was a virtually moonless night, ideal for night operations).
“A lot of factors had to line up to be just right,” Kirby said. “This was the best window to execute the mission.” Kirby said the fight against the Islamic State group and other extremists will continue. “They’re still a threat,” he said. “No one’s taking a victory lap.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
